Tuesday, November 12, 2019

Interstellar Probes

The Voyager probes have taught us a lot about the boundary between our solar system and interstellar space. We weren't expecting there to be a "wall" at the heliopause.

So, maybe it's time to send a proper interstellar probe. Voyager 1 and 2 took 40 years to leave the solar system, but we know a good bit more about building probes now. Using gravity assist, we might be able to get a probe to the heliopause in a much more reasonable decade or so. Solar gravity assist would be faster, Jovian assist would allow more science on the way. (My suggestion would be to actually do both).

We need to take good measurements of true interstellar space. It's colder, it's denser. What else is different? We don't know yet.

And we don't know why the boundary is so sudden. Why the solar system is encased in a bubble. Understanding that could tell us many things about everything from how life is nurtured to the base structure of the universe. (How much is our view of space skewed by being inside our bubble).

We don't know yet, and it's time to find out.

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